DN:FILM The Eyes of Orson Welles
Rejoice, fans of Mark Cousins’ astounding 15-hour documentary, “The Story of Film: An Odyssey.” The Northern Irish filmmaker’s wry, analytical, lyrically contemplative, downright Herzogian voice-over narration—a brogue of light music and crispy edges, at once affected and mesmeric—is the guiding voice of the director’s latest hymn to the splendors of cinema, THE EYES OF ORSON WELLES, a remarkable two-hour meditation on how the great 20th-century auteur’s highly evolved visual flair, as seen in his sketches, drawings and paintings, inexorably shaped the optical extravagance of his sui generis films.
Cousins uses a cache of clips from works ranging from “Citizen Kane” and “The Trial” to “Othello” and “Chimes at Midnight,” plus smart studies of caricatures, doodles, Christmas cards and portraits that Welles created over 60 years—“a lifetime of lines”—proving himself a convincing interpreter of Welles’ artistic intents. The qualities of Welles' artwork, a lesser-known side of the imperious polymath, dovetail with, say, the symphony of camera angles in “Kane” and “The Trial” and the charcoal-influenced textures and compositions in “Macbeth.”
Cousins also assembles a just-right biographical sketch of Welles, rendered in memories, meditations and musings that span family, romance, world travel, politics, theater, radio and movies. Some might find Cousins’ tendency to address the ghost of Welles with epistolary familiarity a bit much, but the gambit mostly works. “Were you in the zone when you drew, Orson, like sports people are in the zone?” he asks the maestro. “Do your sketches show us your unconscious?” Orson doesn’t reply, leaving the answers up to us.
On VOD now and in select theaters March 15.